Doug Sapper, RIP

[Carl Robinson]

One of the true legendaries of our days in Vietnam -- and Cambodia.  A character and a half, as anyone who ever met Doug Sapper would attest.  I always reckoned that name was a pseudonym though.  

With thanks to his good friend Matt Franjola whose advisory to me follows:

A friend or at least an acquaintance of many hacks, Douglas A. Sapper, former 5th SF (ABN) medic died of kidney failure in Tulsa Jan 3. Doug was a "hard five", with 3 stripes on his sleeve, and a larger-than-life character who found his milieu in Vietnam, not just as a soldier but as a Milo Minderbinder-type who gamed the whole Indochina experience.   

He was a friend of mine dating from our time with the PA&E construction Co. and later in Cambodia where he worked for civilian cargo airplane company. He stayed in Phnom Penh after the Khmer Rouge victory and was locked in  the French embassy compound with the rest of the foreign community. 

Doug and I scammed, scrounged and dealed in the finest MASH tradition. The stories are legion and are best told verbally as some are not for family reading.

Doug served at three SF camps - Soui Da, Trang Sup and Dong Xoai all in III corp near Tay Ninh along the Cambodian border. He was at Dong Xoai during the huge battle there June 10, 65 when 1500 enemy attacked the town and SF camp and there was fierce fighting in the rubber plantations. Neal Davis once told me he got some great combat footage during that engagement.

I had not seen Doug in 30 years but we were in touch. He had a traffic accident some years ago and later had a bit of a stroke but he remained feisty.

Anyone who wants to know more will have to wait for the book or movie.

Matt Franjola

[Bruce Palling]

A splendid character - we both lived at the Trocadero in Bangkok in 75/76 and saw each other every other day. A great ladies man, though I think his faith in the seductive effect of apple slices and a glass of Cognac, were seriously misplaced. When we both went our separate ways, our luggage was kept in storage at the Troc - him with SF memorabilia and probably a lot of other MACV bits and pieces, while I had stuff like NVA hats plus the odd low classified counter-insurgeny manuals from Thailand. During one of the numerous coups that Thailand does better than democracy, some unsuspecting coppers discovered this trove and immediately announced that they had foiled a revolutionary plot to overthrow the monarchy - I was apparently the brains and Sapper the brawn. At the time I was reporting from Rhodesia and Sapper I think was either in HK or the States. It didnt go down to well in Africa but I was able to convince Special Branch that this was par for the course in Bangkok. Later when Sapper and I were allowed to return, we reminisced about it all at the Troc. 

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[matt franjola]

Sapper's last Asian hurrah landed him in Katmandu Central Jail for a couple of years for an attempt to smuggle watch parts into Nepal. The tale in brief: in 1977 he was living in HK and visited me in Johannesburg where AP posted me after the war. He was taken by African pattern cloth and other similar motifs saying the stuff would sell in HK at many times the local price. He befriended two English women who ran a high end fashion shop and talked them into shipping thousands of dollars in goods to HK. I took pix of white models wearing the clothing.

Sapper organized a trunk fashion show in a function room in the Hilton Hotel. The two JB shop women were there. The show was a stretch with Sapper running around like a man possessed but he sold nearly all the stuff. The women were happy and returned to JB.

Not content with a reasonable profit and unbeknownst to anyone Sapper got in tow with someone who said watch parts would sell in Katmandu. He bought a suitcase full and all he had to do upon arrival was check the suitcase into a bonded warehouse room at the airport. The double cross fix was in. He was arrested as a smuggler and customs cops took the suitcase.

Many HK-based hacks visited and helped him with care packages while others in the USA lobbied for his release. I never got the story of how release came about but I'm sure it involved dollars. Broke but not broken he returned to Jimmy Carter's stagflation America and tried to start a life in a different country from the one he left in '65. He was not successful but he did learn the PTSD scam routine while attending VA dep't vet meetings. He talked the PTSD talk, was awarded a 100% disability, good monthly benefits and lots of mood altering drugs like Prozac and Xanax which he fed to neighborhood dogs.

Matt

[Anthony Paul]

I don't wish to speak Ill of the dead but Sapper was not without flaws. While he was in Katmandu, I was president of the HKG FCC. Sapper was a member. He had impressed me in Phnom Penh. A day or so before PP fell, I was at the gate of the US Embassy, when Sapper turn up with a body bag containing the remains of some American aircrew of a freighter - DC-3, I think - that had crashed at Pochentong. He told me he felt it was his duty to get the embassy to return the body (bodies?) to next of kin.

I felt I had a duty to do what I could for Sapper when I learned that he was being held in a Nepalese jail. I wrote about him in the FCC magazine and raised a few hundred HK$, then personally arranged through my travel agent at my expense (about US$900) to send a clubmember lawyer to Katmandu to look into Doug's welfare and see what could be done. Through Bill Stubbs, by then at US CONGENHK, who had known Sapper in Phnom Penh and who assured us that his watch-smuggling was a maverick  event, we were in touch with his congressman, who happened to be passing through HKG.  I arranged a dinner at the club for the Congressman and some of  Sapper's friends and he agreeD to do what he could. Some months later, Sapper reappeared at the FCC. But he was not at all grateful. He rubbished me and the lawyer at every opportunity, insisting that the lawyer had enjoyed a free trip to Katmandu at FCC expense,  had done nothing for Sapper and that I should pay for Sapper's long-overdue bar bill. (I'm prepared to believe those PTSD stories.) By then Don Wise was FCC president. I declined giving Sapper any further help and shortly after he disappeared from the colony. 

Tony Paul

paul.a...@gmail.com

[matt franjola]

Tony:

Yes, I heard from HK hacks coming to Safrica that Sapper was an ungrateful bastard during his jail time.

 He could be unnerving like the time he left his pet boas in my Dakao house shower; or when he burned up my Daihatsu pickup truck that I purloined from an NCO club sgt; or when in Joburg when I returned from the Congo to find he picked up a Samoyed dog at the local aspca, or when he burst into my house one Saigon afternoon as I was in mid-flagrante delecto with the lovely lycee student, Monique, who had come looking for "monsieur Duglaa" and he shouted , "hey that's my girl your fuckin."

Matt